Mercury orbits inside the Earth's own path and is therefore tethered to the Sun, wandering at most about twenty-eight degrees ahead of it or behind. A sextile requires sixty. The two figures do not meet, and no amount of orb allowance closes a gap of thirty-two degrees. A chart that appears to show the aspect has an error in it, most often a Mercury placed in the wrong sign by a data-entry slip or by software given the wrong time zone. The first response should be to check the birth data.
The aspect persists in print because aspect tables are usually generated mechanically, listing every planetary pair against every angle without asking which combinations the solar system permits. Some popular sources also confuse the sextile with the greatest elongation, the point at which Mercury stands furthest from the Sun and is briefly visible in twilight. That elongation is the real event, and it has a genuine meaning: the widest separation the mind can achieve from the identity it serves, which at most amounts to a semi-sextile.
A reader who came here looking for cooperative ease between will and intellect almost certainly has Mercury in the adjacent sign, twenty to twenty-eight degrees out. That is the most detached Mercury a chart can hold, and it behaves rather as the sought-after sextile is supposed to: the native can describe their own position as though it belonged to someone else, and can be argued out of it. Whether that detachment is used or left idle is the question worth asking, and it is the only one the placement actually poses.
What It Gives
- ◆greatest elongation gives real detachment
- ◆own position describable from outside
- ◆mind in the neighbouring sign
- ◆arguments that can be revised
What It Costs
- ◆an aspect the sky never produces
- ◆software errors mistaken for testimony
- ◆detachment that reaches only so far
This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.
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